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Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Assad’s Absolute Sovereignty of Syria

By the end of 2012, over 60,000 Syrians had been killed and
over half a million had fled as a result of the civil war in Syria. Shortages
of food and shelter were worsening inside Syria for civilians. In early January
of 2013, a spokesperson for the U.N. said that the international organization
was unable to feed a million residents in combat zones. Acute fuel shortages in
Syria were contributing to the rising price of bread—at least six times greater
than the pre-conflict price. Additionally, an outbreak of violence in a large
Syrian refugee camp of 54,000 refugees in Jordan amid a winter storm was
reported. “The incident followed a night of heavy storms, during which
torrential rains and high winds swept away tents and left parts of the camp
flooded,” an official in Save the Children said in a statement. One might ask
what was really behind the deteriorating conditions.

At first glance, the culprit is merely that of two centers
of power fighting for dominance within Syria. World history had been littered
with such conflicts. However, this explanation does not explain why other
countries permitted the harm in Syria to worsen. Lest one be content to ascribe
the impotence to a web of international alliances and politics, it can be asked
whether principles could have been holding back otherwise willing
interventionists.

In a rare public address, President Assad of Syria claimed
early in 2013 that the sovereignty of Syria, which is for him the top
principle, is “based on the principles and goals of the UN Charter and the
international law which all stress on the sovereignty, independence and
territorial integrity of countries.” National sovereignty is absolute. In
making this well-established principle explicit, Assad could have drawn on western
political theory—namely, the thought of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes.

In the war-weary context of the seventeenth century, Hobbes
wrote that the king needed absolute sovereignty, even as the definitive
interpreter of divine law. Any constraint in the latter on a king would pertain
to his afterlife, and therefore not bear on a king’s actual conduct. Jean Bodin
too had viewed divine law as a constraint on otherwise absolute sovereignty,
though for that theorist the king is not the definitive decider on divine law.
Accordingly, such law could in principle act as a constraint on a king even in
this world. Even so, other powers could not intervene at the expense of
national sovereignty.

Unlike Bodin and
Hobbes, Assad defended absolute sovereignty out of fear that Syria would be
brought into submission by foreign powers. “A country that is thousands of
years old cannot be dictated to,” Assad said, by foreign powers. “Syria has always been, and will remain, a
free and sovereign country that won’t accept submission and tutelage.” Anything
less than absolute sovereignty means becoming the vessel of an imperial power.
In making this point, Assad could have drawn on dependency theory in international
political economy. The sovereignty of developing countries is compromised or
surrendered by their subservient economies. In being “allowed” to export only
commodities, for example, a developing country could be at the mercy of one or
a few countries that are the principal buyers. Those countries could keep the
developing country from industrializing so as to retain economic and even
political leverage.

In other words, Assad’s position combines the Bodin-Hobbes
notion of absolute sovereignty with a theory of economic development that
stresses the structural subservience of developing countries. In fact,
dependency may lie at the root of Assad’s notion of national sovereignty. The
problem with Assad’s rendering is that sovereignty can be viewed as limited
without necessarily entailing submission to a foreign power.

Beyond the geopolitical and related mercantilist interests
of particular countries, the international community could come to a consensus
on how far a government can justifiably go in inflicting harm domestically under
the principle of national sovereignty before outside powers would be justified
in intervening. In terms of such harm, wounding or killing unarmed residents
would trigger relatively close limits on national sovereignty, while the harm
unleashed in a civil war would have a higher threshold. Rather than involving
submission to the foreign powers, the limitations on national sovereignty would
be geared to stopping the harm by removing the extant government from power.
Once the government whose legitimacy had been lost internationally is expunged,
the emphasis of the international community would turn to assisting the people
in the construction of their own new government. To be sure, Assad would view
such an approach as a cloak used by imperial Western powers to dominate Syria. The
international community would thus be well-advised to stress its own restraint
in placing limits on national sovereignty.

Given the sheer extent of harm inflicted on the Syrian
population by the end of 2012, however, the international community would be
justified in intervening in Syria to immobilize Assad’s government even without
concern for the “submission” argument on behalf of absolute sovereignty. That
the world stayed on the sidelines, essentially allowing the situation “on the
ground” to worse so much, suggests that the dominance of the Bodin-Hobbes
notion of absolute sovereignty was still too great, and thus should be
subjected to critique. In other words, the powers around the world in favor of
intervening should not have felt like they would be imposing in stepping in to
stop the violence. The notion of a country being under temporary international occupation because a
government had lost its legitimacy due to the harm inflicted or permitted was
well overdue even before Assad’s government had gone after unarmed protesters.

The matter of default itself,
particularly its staying power (as though a house guest who will not leave), is
the true culprit that kept the world at bay as Syria degenerated in a cycle of
increasing violence and suffering. Why it is that the default can continue to
enjoy hegemony even when it should be subject to critique—this is the
underlying question before us here.

Assad can claim that
Syria’s sovereignty is absolute. This does not necessarily make it so, even
ideationally. He can claim that absolute sovereignty is a necessary bulwark
against becoming the agent of another country, but this does not mean that is
assumption is valid. In making his claim, he could rely on the default and thus count on the related
trepidation of the international community in intervening even to stop
horrendous suffering.

If the U.N. is necessarily bound to the notion of absolute
sovereignty (even if kept so by one member’s veto), then the international
community would be well within its prerogative to form a new international
organization (even without necessarily having to leave the U.N.)that is oriented to placing and enforcing
limits on national sovereignty. Such an organization would say, in effect, “No,
we will not stand by as great harm takes place within a country.” Would not
bystanders be justified in saying something similar as a boyfriend beats his
girlfriend in public and restraining the man? Were he to claim that being
restrained in that instance would imply or result in him becoming a slave would
hardly be taken seriously, and yet Assad’s claim of Syria’s absolute sovereignty
had its defenders abroad and even held other powers at bay when they would have
been justified in intervening to stop the harm. Were the dogmatic basis of
Assad’s claim made transparent (i.e., obvious), the notion that sovereignty is
somehow absolute would finally be viewed as artificial in nature rather than as
part of the basis of Western civilization; the demise of the reigning default
would not have to wait generations needlessly before being realized.